The Rule of Economy

This is part of a series on Unix Design Principles to help us design code that can be written faster.

In this post, we’ll discuss the Rule of Economy.

Rule of Economy

The rule of economy:

Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time.

It has two caveats. If your product is faster machine time, then you can trade your time for machine time.

If you’re broke, then more machine time isn’t an option.

Real World Application

In this section, I’ll walk you through how to apply this rule in the real world. I had a real life design choice and this principle influenced the decision.

In another life, I run engineering for a startup, Backtester.io. It’s an easy-to-use online financial backtester. The rule of economy helped me design the “analysis” feature. Here’s some quick background:

A financial backtester is a simulator. Users specify parameters, run an simulation (called a “backtest”), and get results. They can use it two ways:

• Run a “backtest”. The user specifies every paramet…